" The truth is, " says Michael Colgan, co-producer of the " Beckett on Film " project, " when these plays came out, there was no doubt that they were more attractive to the intellectuals, or maybe even to the suicidal. " Colgan goes on to make a case for Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett as a comedian: " I mean, a man who will say that the day you die is the same as any other, except shorter . . . he’s just being funny. " In fact, the ambitious " Beckett on Film " project, part of which will be broadcast on Stage on Screen this weekend, more often makes you want to slit your wrists than split your sides. But it does both with exquisite precision.

According to Jeremy Irons’s narration, it all began with a 1991 festival of Beckett’s complete plays at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, where Colgan is artistic director; he and Alan Moloney then conceived the " Beckett on Film " project. Over the course of 18 months, beginning in 1999, 19 of Beckett’s plays were filmed by 19 different directors, each charged with faithfully transferring the notoriously fussy playwright’s work. Seven of the 19 films are shown, along with snippets of others and behind-camera interviews (director Neil Jordan credits Beckett with expressing " the trauma of being " ). In January, Stage on Screen will present Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film of Beckett’s most famous work, Waiting for Godot.

Perhaps the most riveting of the films here is Anthony Minghella’s rendition of the 1963 one-act Play. The Oscar-winning director of The English Patient sets Beckett’s trio of urns, from which protrude the heads of a man and two women endlessly interspersing details of a long-ago love triangle, in a nightmarish, primæval graveyard of occupied urns. The scaly, muddy heads of the characters, known only as W1, M, and W2, suggest both fungi and fish (not to mention the 1964 Old Vic production on which Beckett assisted). As Minghella’s darting camera stands in for Beckett’s inquisitor spotlight, the roles are enacted by a fierce English trio of Kristin Scott Thomas, Alan Rickman, and Juliet Stevenson, who take to heart Beckett’s terse direction " Rapid tempo throughout. " What’s more, the entire work is repeated before we’re released from its bondage. Here the actors speak so rapidly that, even after listening to the sordid bits and pieces twice, you don’t catch everything — which makes the particulars of the long-ago soap opera utterly negligible and torturous memory the point.

Beckett was also, as Irons points out, a fan of Bugs Bunny and Charlie Chaplin. In Act Without Words II, the young Irish filmmaker Enda Hughes substitutes for Beckett’s " violently lit " narrow platform a strip of celluloid through which the mime work’s two clowns, one depressive, the other jaunty, make their way from right to left. Portrayed with herky-jerky silent-movie exactitude by Pat Kinevane and Marcello Magni, they emerge in succession from their sacks to go about the routines of the day before returning to neatly bagged, Mummenschanz-like repose.

For the experimental, minute-long Breath, which consists of a strangled cry, amplified breathing, and a landscape of rubbish, the controversial British installation artist Damien Hirst weighs in with a sort of hurtling collage of contemporary detritus. And director Damien O’Donnell superimposes a lofty library setting on the Pinteresque What Where, a sinister who’s-on-first about intimidation.

Charles Sturridge directs Irons in Ohio Impromptu, whose two long-white-haired characters, a Listener and the Reader who voices the Listener’s painful relinquishment of a lost love, are meant to be as one. Irons, in formal cadence and Dead Ringers duplicate, invokes the quiet suffering of the work, and Sturridge follows Beckett’s directions explicitly, at the end pulling the camera away from the duo to fill the screen with the light of morning or, possibly, death. Similarly, John Crowley directs Paola Dionisotti, Anna Massey, and Sian Phillips in a Come and Go that achieves Beckett’s vision and precision, the play’s three women of indeterminate age, childhood friends in identical muted-colored coats, seeming less to exit than to dematerialize in succession as the remaining two tell urgent secrets.

The 1982 Catastrophe (which the playwright wrote for Václav Havel) has a self-reflexive element. David Mamet directs Harold Pinter in the brief allegory on authority in which a stage director (Pinter), abetted by an assistant (Rebecca Pidgeon), meticulously dictates the arrangement of the " catastrophe " that is the human being, in this case " the Protagonist, " played by Sir John Gielgud in his last filmed performance. There is a goosebump-producing moment at the end when the lights home in on his face and Gielgud, his limbs and ragged long underwear positioned to suit, turns his piercing-blue, 96-year-old eyes toward us. And there is the realization that without Beckett, there would have been no Pinter or Mamet.